Complex Cognition

All of cognition is complex. Things that seem easy to us, like identifying and reaching for a cup, is still cutting-edge research in computer vision and robotics. But cognition becomes even more complex when it requires putting many cognitive acts together to perform tasks like solving IQ puzzles or planning a project.

Asking how the brain performs its most impressive tasks has been a long-term research focus for our team members, and it's the explicit goal of one of our current research projects. We are developing theories about how perceptual areas in the posterior interact with episodic memory functions of the hippocampus, under the direction of the executive function enacted by the prefrontal cortex, to learn and accomplish arbitrarily complex tasks. This research has promise in the area of neuroscience and cognitive psychology; we also believe it can contribute important ideas to the area of general artificial intelligence.